Artist 30: Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinksy was born in 1866 in Moscow, Russia. He was an abstract modern painter (the first) and art theorist. He studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. He was very successful in this field and was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat, at the age of 30. Here he started painting, mainly with figure studies and anatomy.

in 1896 he moved to Munich and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He returned to Moscow after WWII, became frustrated with Russian theories of art, and went back to Germany. He then taught at Bauhaus until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he became a citizen in 1939 and spent the rest of his life.

He developed his abstract style of painting after an intense period of inner reflection and theorization. His paintings still represented actual identifiable objects. It wasn't until he moved back to Russia from Germany that his paintings became non-objective. Upon his move back to Russia, and his anger towards Russian art theories, he broke every single rule on painting. His work became very geometric, colorful, and strange. No one had ever seen anything like these before.

Wassily also had synesthesia, like me. These Post Munich pieces were the very first modern expressionist pieces ever made in the history of man kind. His use of synesthesia is highly influential for me as a fellow synesthete. He has taught me to not be afraid to try something different, and to fully commit to your ideas, no matter how unusual they are.

"Composition VII"